Backup your data as a New Year Resolution. There are two backup locations now, and you should be using both: Local backup (in-home) and cloud-backup. This is the year. Don't be a statistic. [Note: I adopted Windows Home Server 2011 for local backup and CrashPlan for cloud back in 2011.]

Cloud backup. You can't just backup to a USB hard drive. Cloud-based backup is the new offsite backup. I'm investigating KeepVault for WHS 2011. But you have a lot more choices for individual PCs. [Note: As noted above, I adopted CrashPlan in 2011.]

Get up to speed on Office 2007/2010 ribbon. Microsoft Office Labs' Search Commands provides a new tab for Office 2007/2010 apps that helps you find the commands you used to use in the old interface. Thanks to Mark Evans for the tip And there's a new version of Ribbon Hero, a fun way to discover features and functionality within Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.

Use Windows Live Photo Gallery to fix date/time of photos. Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you sort photos by date taken, group by camera, and adjust time relatively. It's under the Edit tab select all the photos from one camera click adjust time and you can bump it however you need too. Thanks to Matt Battaglia for the tip.

Windows Home Server 2011 OEM version on the cheap. WHS 2011 is now available on Amazon.com and NewEgg.com for about $120. [Note: This deal has gotten significantly better: WHS 2011 is $45 on Amazon today and $53 at Newegg.com.]

Try Windows Intune 2. It's free through the end of the year, works on up to ten PCs, and is a surprisingly awesome PC management solution. [Note: Windows Intune 2 is now publicly available and, of course, 2011 is over. Currently, you can get a 30-day trial version of Intune 2.]

Reclaim Disk Space with Disk Cleanup. Disk Cleanup is a handy tool in Windows 7 that can free up space on your disk(s) if you're running low, which is suddenly a need again now in this age of SSDs. But it's especially useful for the post-SP1 upgrade, when Microsoft dumps GBs of unneeded files on the disk in case you need to restore to pre-SP1 (which almost never happens). The SP1 upgrade files are under the item called "System Files". To find Disk Cleanup, use Start Menu Search and type "disk clean" (no quotes). It will ask you to select a disk (generally will be C: but try it on other drives too, if present). Thanks to David Sherman for the tip.

Learn to Use Windows 8 with a mouse and keyboard. I've been publishing a series of Tips articles for using Windows 8 on the PCs we already have. Surprise! It works great, especially if you know the secrets to mouse and keyboard usage. [Note: These articles include Windows 8 Tip: Windows Key Shortcuts and Windows 8 Tip: Using a Mouse.]

New features for Office Web Apps on Windows Live SkyDrive. Microsoft this week added a few new features to the Office Web Apps on SkyDrive. You can now print directly from the Excel Web App; display ink content in the OneNote Web App; merge and auto-fit cells in the Excel Web App; and use right click menus in the Excel Web App.

Use Disconnect Me to stop third parties and search engines from tracking the webpages you go to and searches you do. Requires Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.

Backup your music collection to the cloud. Microsoft is late to the game, but you can and should backup your entire music collection to the cloud now. And you can do it for free. Google Music provides free cloud-based storage of up to 20,000 songs. Amazon Cloud Player (part of Amazon Cloud Drive) provides 5 GB of storage for free and has different tiers of storage you can pay for (20 GB is $20 per year, for example.) Anything you buy from Amazon isn't counted towards your storage total. And both services backup not just your collection but also your playlists.